Lexington

Into the maze

Tom Ridge has been handed one of the most difficult jobs in government

SUCH unanimity is remarkable, even in wartime. Everybody in Washington welcomes George Bush's decision to put the governor of Pennsylvania, Tom Ridge, in charge of “homeland security”. Everybody agrees the current system is a mess. And they all seem to worry that his chances of success are slim.

This is no reflection on Mr Ridge. A governor of a big state who has spent time in both the army and Congress, he has about as good a CV as you can get for the new job. He is far tougher than his urbane exterior suggests. He made it to Harvard after a childhood in a housing project. He served as an infantryman in Vietnam. And he built a career as a Republican in a strongly Democratic region. Mr Ridge delights in taking on entrenched bureaucracies: as a governor, he has done valiant battle with both the teachers' unions and the welfare establishment. But he also has a talent for coalition-building. He made friends on both sides of the political divide by championing two of the country's most emotive causes, abortion rights and school choice. “I'd walk on hot coals for Tom Ridge,” says John McCain, a man worth listening to.

Yet Mr Ridge's new job will test these skills to the maximum. The current system looks like something that Osama bin Laden might have designed with the express purpose of slipping his killers into America. Responsibility for domestic security is scattered among 40 federal bureaus and offices housed in 20 government agencies, which in turn report to two dozen congressional committees. Many of these groups are more interested in protecting their turf than in fighting terrorists. Computer systems are incompatible. Lines of communication are strained. Two of the terrorists who took part in the horrors of September 11th were able to enter the country and buy airline tickets even though they were on the FBI watch-list.

Everywhere you look there are signs of laxness and confusion. The National League of Cities reports that a third of the country's cities have no plan to deal with any sort of terrorist attack. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission admits that the country's 100 or so nuclear reactors were not built to withstand the impact of a jet airliner. The system abounds with woolly names such as the Centre for Domestic Preparedness and the Critical Infrastructure Assurance Office. The latter is hidden in a corner of the Commerce Department, and has only a $5m-a-year budget. The Centre for Domestic Preparedness, one of the few places that teaches civilian emergency workers how to deal with deadly chemicals, has managed to train a mere 6,000 people out of a relevant workforce of 11m. Last week two of its 80-bed dormitories, and over half of its 25 classrooms, were empty.

Ways and means

How can this disastrous mess be fixed? Two schools of thought are currently slugging it out in the capital: the minimalists, and the institution-builders.

The minimalists want Mr Ridge to be a tsar, with a seat at the cabinet table but no department. They argue that this arrangement will avoid any need to rearrange the administration and get congressional approval for senior appointments. The essence of the new job, they point out, is always going to be co-ordination. So why go to the trouble of inventing a new bureaucracy? And why endure the rigmarole of having to get your senior staff confirmed by Congress?

The minimalists scoff at the criticism that the new security tsar will be powerless. The closest model for the new office, they argue, is the National Security Council, which co-ordinates the work of diplomacy, defence and intelligence. And nobody could accuse either Henry Kissinger or Condoleezza Rice of being powerless. This is more or less the White House's position.

The institution-builders retort that there is no substitute for having direct control over both a departmental budget and a departmental staff—and that anybody who thinks otherwise should study the dismal careers of Washington's various energy and drug tsars over the years. Earlier this year a bipartisan panel headed by two former senators, Gary Hart and Warren Rudman, drew up a detailed plan for rolling four government agencies, including the border-control agency and the customs service, into a single homeland agency. There is plenty of support for this on Capitol Hill at the moment.

Will the struggle between the rival bureaucracies distract attention from the job of protecting America? There are two reasons for optimism. The first is that a benign compromise may evolve from the clash between the two. Mr Ridge will inevitably start off with limited resources. But a combination of congressional pressure and Mr Ridge's own lobbying may provide him with a growing empire. Two senators have already introduced legislation to give him a budget. Other legislators promise to put forward bills creating a new super-agency against terrorism.

The second reason for optimism is that Mr Ridge already possesses the most valuable resource in Washington: a close relationship with the president. The two men have known each other since 1980, when Mr Ridge worked as a lieutenant in George Bush senior's first presidential campaign. They later cemented their bond when they were both elected governors in 1994. Last year Mr Ridge was in the running for the vice-presidential nomination (but his pro-abortion stand eventually ruled him out). The two have been seen together so often recently that Mr Ridge is being dubbed “the first friend”.

The friendship will be vital as Mr Ridge defines his job. In this new war, terrorists already have an extraordinary range of advantages. They can shift at will from one battlefield to another. They can strike from a thousand hidden places. They can exploit the liberties free men take for granted to wreak terrible destruction. It would be a tragedy, to put it mildly, if bureaucratic squabbling unnecessarily held the door open for them.